1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to network devices, and more particularly, to systems and methods for improving the processing efficiency of data streams in such network devices.
2. Description of Related Art
The rise of the global Internetwork, commonly called the Internet, has led to a massive expansion in data networking applications, including academic, business and industrial applications. Accompanying the growth of the Internet has been the development and adoption of TCP/IP protocol as the Internet protocol standard. Transmission control protocol (TCP) is a connection-oriented transport protocol of the Internet architecture that provides a reliable byte-stream delivery service. Internet Protocol (IP) provides a connectionless best effort delivery service of datagrams across the Internet.
TCP/IP conventionally is used in many layer 5-7 switching applications, such as web caching, file caching and content switches. Such switching applications parse TCP/IP streams to obtain the information required for intelligent switching. Switching applications conventionally implement TCP/IP fully in software. Software TCP/IP implementations, however, are slow and cannot handle many TCP/IP streams in parallel. In client/server configurations, for example, the slow speed of the TCP/IP software implementations limits the number of clients (e.g., parallel TCP/IP streams) a server can serve. This often requires that many servers be used to achieve the desired processing speed.
Therefore, there exists a need for systems and methods that can accelerate TCP/IP stream processing in switching applications so as to increase the number of parallel TCP/IP streams that a given switching application can handle efficiently.